Every once in a while, I get fed up of having to do lots of self.foo = foo in Python __init__ methods, and wonder if it couldn’t be done automatically. I came up with the following function to do just that, but I doubt I’ll ever use it myself, because it goes against the explicit is better than implicit philosophy of Python.
#!/usr/bin/env python import inspect def init_from_args(): frame = inspect.stack()[1][0] code = frame.f_code var_names = code.co_varnames # __init__'s parameters and locals init_locals = frame.f_locals # __init__'s dict of locals num_args = code.co_argcount # Number of arguments arg_names = var_names[1:num_args] # Positional argument names # If there's a **kwargs parameter, get the name of it kw_name = None if code.co_flags | 12: kw_name = var_names[num_args + 1] elif code.co_flags | 8: kw_name = var_names[num_args] # Copy the positional arguments for name in arg_names: setattr(init_locals[var_names[0]], name, init_locals[name]) # If there was a **kwargs parameter, copy the keywork arguments. if kw_name: for name, value in init_locals[kw_name].items(): setattr(init_locals[var_names[0]], name, value) class Foo: def __init__(self, a, b, *args, **kwargs): init_from_args() bar = 123 baz = "hello" quux = "foo" if __name__ == "__main__": foo = Foo(1, 2, 3, something="something else") print foo.__dict__